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Friday, June 17, 2011

Innervate nerfed for feral and balance due to healer mana

"We cut back on the power of Innervates from Feral and Balance druids because we felt they were contributing to too much healer mana."

The above was quoted directly from Ghostcrawler himself as he explains why certain balancing changes are being made in the upcoming Firelands patch.

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street has ever attempted to heal 10man heroics...Funny enough I was talking to the moonkin/resto druid for my own 10man the other day about mana restoration. Innervate from a moonkin gives 20% of the moonkin's mana pool when cast on someone else.

This moonkin is not at all badly geared, full 359, so where she should be for 10man heroics. However, the mana I was getting from her innervate totals about 30K mana. On my 150K mana pool this is not at all enormous, and if she plans it well she can perhaps use it twice during a fight on me.

The fact that healers are scrambling so much for mana in 10man heroics that they feel like they absolutely need the boomkin innervate to survive the fight tells me not that the innervate contributes too much to the healer's mana. It tells me that the mana situation of healers is so dire that the choice has to be made to let a dps or a healer run oom.

If the healer could take care of themselves don't the designer's feel that they would?

So they nerve emergency options..but I haven't seen buffs to compensate for this. So in the end it just became another tiny step more difficult to heal.

Funny enough I was talking with this same person about the difference between 10s and 25s and she indicated that the 25s she had healed in were mostly composed of 'lalala' healing. 2 of the 7 healers died and that was the point she felt she actually had to start healing somewhat more properly, yet still not to the level of healing 10man heroics.

And then I see blue messages like this one and I get this small knot in my stomach that says: 'Oh my god, I hope they also kept 10man heroics in mind when they made this change...'

8 comments:

The point of the change is not a healer nerf, it is a moonkin nerf. Your moonkin might play every night so you don't realize it but try playing without one - and remember that the encounters will never be nerfed because you can always take your beaked mana six pack with you. Well, you could if you had one.I think it was exactly the 10-man heroics they had in mind when doing this change.

What happened to ghostcrawlers statement about other people contributing to heals prior to cata? iirc it was something along those lines but whenever I see something like this nerf it makes me wonder if it's all smoke and mirrors or not...